Soleares Research, LLC is a market research and consulting firm servicing the annuity
and life insurance businesses. We provide, through our website, periodic articles
that cover important industry trends; we also offer clients phone or on-site consultations,
executive briefings and presentations. We pride ourselves on first-class customer
service and responsiveness to our clients. We aim to be an indispensable resource
to the marketplace.

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In our view as we enter the heart of the holiday season, things are looking up for the variable annuity business: sales are recovering and insurers are building out their product offerings again. In this report we’ll share some thoughts on the current state of affairs and touch on recent product developments...

Based on our review of selected public insurers’ third quarter results, and recently-released data from industry research firms, we think the variable annuity business experienced positive uplift in the quarter, which we think will carry through the rest of this year...

As third quarter earnings season is well underway, in this commentary we’ll provide a few forward-looking thoughts on how the variable annuity industry may have performed during that time period – we’ll follow up with actual sales numbers later when we compile them. In addition we’ll cover some noteworthy product filings from recent weeks...

In this report we’ll cover a batch of notable variable annuity product filings from this month which includes a benefit buyback offer, a contract exchange offer, new contract registrations, multiple fee changes and other adjustments...

In recent weeks we’ve been noticing some interesting variable annuity product filings come through – most of them involving changes to existing contracts and benefits – and in this report we’ll report on them...

It’s been a few weeks since Ohio National announced it will be exiting the industry, even so we thought we should offer up a little historical perspective and thoughts about what the departure might mean for other players...

Variable annuity sales for most stock-traded insurers we follow regularly showed improvement in the second quarter, which no doubt contributed to the industry’s quarter-over-quarter rise. This report will be our customary quarterly rundown of what we gleaned from insurers’ earnings reports...

This will be a brief commentary touching on some of the main attributes of structured annuities, a product type that has garnered significant sales traction in recent years and has been a source of innovative tweaks and modifications on the part of insurers...

Second-quarter earnings season for stock-traded insurers is now underway and we are looking forward to hearing how variable annuity sales fared for companies we watch regularly. We suspect that more than a few carriers experienced at least modest improvement...

Over the past few weeks filing activity along the variable annuity product pipeline has been a bit slow, typical for the summer, however there were a pair of noteworthy adjustments made by insurers which we’ll cover in this report...

In a commentary of a few weeks ago we discussed recent developments related to structured annuities and now it’s time to follow up on that subject, as we’ve seen some new registrations and a possible indication that one is now available for sale. As usual we’ll also cover other interesting things we unearthed in our filing research...

In recent weeks we’ve seen a batch of interesting new filings submitted to the SEC: they contained new structured annuities, enhancements and tweaks to variable annuity guaranteed living benefits and a death benefit buyback offer from a legacy carrier...

Variable annuity industry sales were better than expected in the first quarter of this year and we suspect that if conditions continue to improve over the rest of 2018, insurers will feel more comfortable to come out with interesting new product ideas...

In this report we’ll cover noteworthy variable annuity filings of recent weeks: another benefit exchange offer from Ohio National that looks much like one we wrote about last year, some guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefit changes from American General and a new contract from Lincoln National...

First-quarter variable annuity deposits for most of the stock-traded insurers we monitor regularly were better compared to the prior-year quarter and we expect the industry may have had a similar experience...

This report covers variable insurance fund filings that we found interesting from last month, a time when a relatively small batch of new registrations came through, along with a fairly large amount of changes to existing funds...

This report contains a brief update to our tracking of variable annuity product filing activity – which continues to be relatively slow – and a short summary of an interesting new variable and index-linked life policy, plus notes on new pieces of our Featured Research...

In this report we’ll get caught up on variable annuity products that were filed from mid-February into early March. Included in this batch were a few enhancements to guaranteed living benefits, making us think that insurers are getting into a more competitive mode in order to increase their sales...

As we typically do each earnings season, we reviewed variable annuity business results for a small number of selected stock-traded insurers and for most of them, sales improved in Q4, however we can’t say the same about the industry as a whole...

In recent weeks we’ve seen an uptick in product filings coming through around the variable annuity industry, including new contracts, guaranteed benefits and other changes that we’ll cover in this commentary...